Andean, Caribbean and Amazonian subjects have been repeatedly repositioned in a western conceptual repertoire centering on the extraction of labor, minerals and ultimately wealth, at the expense of human-environment interactions that exceed this materialist logic. The session’s three papers explore humans as they engage with forest, glacier and island worlds, in order to bring these extra-colonial forms of life back into focus. Each paper will be 20 minutes, leaving 15 minutes for open discussion.

Legnani’s contribution analyzes the use of the term naturaleza in sixteenth-century Spanish to refer both to a subject’s community of belonging—i.e., patria—and to Nature, or those living beings defined as not human (Moore). In the context of an empire expanding through overseas enterprises, the symbolic and material economies of the natural/native and belonging(s) rely on classifications that seem both transparent and contradictory. This paper follows the moral and material trajectory of Columbus among the Madeira, Canary, and Caribbean islands, as told by Las Casas in Historia de las Indias and his marginal notes to Columbus’s Diario a bordo (ca. 1530). Following Martínez-San Miguel (2017) and Pugh (2013), Legnani argues that periphrasis—or rhetorical circumnavigation—not only traces the assemblages that give rise to these islands’ coloniality but also allows us to imagine other futures from distinct junctures in the past. In sum, Las Casas ties these junctures to the island-hopping of the conquistadors, thus giving a spatial dimension to the counterfactual moments in his narrative of conquests.

Carey-Webb’s intervention reflects on legacies of Extractivism and Transformative Decolonialism in the Amazon with a reflection on A Febre (The Fever). The 2019 Brazilian film, written and directed by Maya Da-Rin, tells the story of a Desana man, Justino, who migrates to the Amazonian city of Manaus to work as a security guard at a cargo port. His daughter, an aspiring physician, lives with and takes care of him. As the film progresses, Justino experiences an intermittent fever with dreams and visions calling him back to his village at the forest’s edge. In this sense, modernity becomes a disease that pushes Justino to reencounter a closer relationship with nature. A Febre is a nuanced, important film centering an Indigenous character while highlighting the disengagement caused by migration and city life. As a meditation on modernity and Indigeneity, the film reveals the toll of capitalism and a subsequent return to nature. To that end, it interrogates the intolerable conditions of modernity, particularly for Indigenous peoples – pushing to reimagine new ways of being. The presentation examines Western engagement of Indigenous concepts of hunting and consumption as not necessarily antithetical to modernity, but rather as a means of reorganization and of questioning the Western separation between nature and culture.

Finally, Serna Jeri’s contribution focusses on the extirpation of idolatries in sixteenth and seventeenth century Peru. In this context, Spanish missionaries and colonial authorities intervened in Andean human-nature interrelationships with the goals of Catholic proselytization and establishing colonial control over lands and labor. Serna Jeri examines the landscape rituals and place-names focal in two Central Andean colonial documents—Hernández Príncipe’s visitas and the Huarochiri Manuscript—counterposing these with the political discourse on matter and nature expressed in Jose de Acosta’s “Historia Natural y Moral de la Indias.” In the discursive formation of these narratives, this paper analyzes how knowledge about weather and climate, particularly rit’i (ice and glaciers) and Illapa (lightning), were taken up in Catholic and extractivist colonial understandings of nature. In comparing these narratives—written both by Spanish and indigenous narrators—Serna Jeri focuses in particular on relations with the environments that have social meaning exceeding the logic of primitive accumulation. She argues that in these narratives, such human-environmental social forms are reinvented as “idolatrous” practice, inscribing them in religious categories that fail to capture their political and economic dimensions. This paper examines how colonial narratives were framed in terms of this emergent knowledge about nature, climate, and particularly ice and lightning.